So that was how it happened that Edith burst in upon Eleanor's dear domesticity of two. Maurice, having once agreed to his wife's wish, was rather pleased at the prospect. "It will help on money," he thought; "another hundred a year will come in handy to Lily. And it will be sort of nice to have Buster in the house."
Lily had not said she must have another hundred. She did not even think so. "_I_ can swing it!" Lily had said, sturdily. And she did; but of course, as Maurice, to his intense discomfort, knew only too well, it was hard to swing it. Even with what help he could give her, she couldn't possibly have got along if she had not been astonishingly efficient and thrifty, always looking at both sides of a cent! "I ain't smoking any more," Lily said once; "well, 'tain't _only_ to save money; but I don't want Jacky to be getting any funny ideas!" (this when "Ernest Augustus" was only a few months old!) She had a tiny house on Maple Street, with a sun-baked front yard, in which a few shrubs caught the dust on their meager foliage; and she had a border of pansies in the shade under the bay window;--"I _must_ have flowers!" Lily said, apologetically;--and she had three roomers, and she had scraped the locality for mealers. She would have made more money if she had not fed her boarders so well. "But there!" said Lily; "if I give 'em nice food, they'll stay!" But, all the same, Maurice knew that two or three dollars more a week would "come in handy." His sense of irritated responsibility about her made him long for that twenty-fifth birthday which would bring him his own money. For, in spite of Lily's thriftiness, her expenses, as well as her toil, kept increasing, and Maurice, cursing himself whenever he thought that but for him she would be "on easy street" at Marston's, had begun the inevitable borrowing. The payment of the interest on his note was a tax on his salary; yet not so taxing as the necessity of being constantly on guard against some careless word which might make Eleanor ask questions about that salary.
But Eleanor asked very few questions about anything so practical as income. Her interest in money matters, now, in regard to Edith, was merely that Edith was a means to an end--Maurice could have his own home! The finding a house, under Mrs. Newbolt's candid guidance--and Maurice's worried reminders that he couldn't "afford" more than so much rent!--gave Eleanor the pleasantest summer she had had since that first summer when, in the meadow, she and Maurice had watched the clouds, and the locust blossoms, and told each other that nothing in heaven or earth, or the waters under the earth, could part them...